Easter post - 2026

Back in the days of the Jesus Seminar, I remember there being debates about whether the resurrection of Jesus was a metaphor. John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg both seemed to think it was all just a metaphor and that the authors of the gospels didn't even intend to say the resurrection of Jesus was a literal historical event.

Paul definitely appears to be talking about a literal event when he wrote the following:

But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. 16 For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. 18 Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. 19 If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. ~1 Corinthians 15:12-19

These comments came right after Paul reminded the Corinthians of the gospel had had preached to them earlier, which says that Christ was raised from the dead (1 Corinthians 15:4). If Paul taught them, as part of his central message, that Christ was raised from the dead, why might the Corinthians have thought there was no resurrection?

One possibility is that Paul actually does use resurrection language in a metaphorical way. In fact, he seems to use both Christ's death and resurrection as things that happened to us. For example, Paul says that he was crucified with Christ (Galatians 2:19). He says that when we are saved, we are raised up with Christ and seated in heavenly places (Ephesians 2:6). He says we are buried with him in baptism (Colossians 2:12) and that we have been raised with him (Colossians 3:1).

These metaphors Paul uses appear to refer to the fact that when we are saved, we "die" to our former way of being and are "raised" into a kind of new mode of existence. It's not a literal resurrection. It's a metaphorical resurrection each of us experiences when we are regenerated. Paul uses Christ's literal resurrection as a metaphor to explain our spiritual transformation.

It may be that the Corinthians misunderstood Paul to be talking strictly of a metaphorical resurrection, and that's why they denied an actual resurrection at the end of the age. In reality, it is the fact that Jesus' resurrection happened literally and historically that makes it such a powerful metaphor when applied to our lives. By placing our faith in him, we die to our old selves and are reborn or resurrected to new life.

But that does not diminish the fact that we will one day join him in glory. We will be literally resurrected from the dead just as he was.

Happy Easter!

Prior year Easter posts:

2025 - Some thoughts on the empty tomb and minimal facts
2024 - My annual Easter resurrection post
2023 - My Easter resurrection post - 2023
2022 - Can grief hallucinations explain the appearances of Jesus?
2021 - A quick and dirty argument for the resurrection of Jesus
2020 - Jesus was raised from the dead

Why didn't most Jews in the first century believe in Jesus?

I've been asked a number of times over the years why the vast majority of Jews didn't believe that Jesus was the messiah during his lifetime. These questions are always asked as if it were a reason for us to doubt that Jesus is the messiah.

I want to share three reasons I think most Jews did not believe Jesus was the messiah during his lifetime. There are probably other reasons, but these jump out at me.

First, Jesus was not the only person in the first century who made himself out to be the messiah. There were multiple people who either made overt claims to being the messiah or else took actions suggesting a messianic claim. Josephus lists about a dozen of them. There's a section in L. Michael White's book, From Jesus to Christianity, where he discusses some of them. I'd list a few, but I don't have the book with me. I may update this post later. With multiple people all claiming to be the messiah, it's natural to be skeptical of any particular claim.

Second, Jesus did not fulfill all the prophecies the messiah was expected to fill during his lifetime. Jesus didn't re-unite Judah and Israel, he didn't re-establish the throne of Israel or accomplish national sovereignty, he didn't usher in an era of peace and prosperity, etc. Unless somebody has fulfilled all the messianic prophecies, there'll be reason for doubt. We Christians believe Jesus rose from the dead and that he will fulfill all the prophecies, but it's understandable why a Jew in the first century would be skeptical until all the prophecies had been fulfilled. The fact that Jesus died without fulfilling the prophecies would've been the nail in the coffin if not for the resurrection.

Third, most of us have a natural skepticism toward lofty claims that people make about themselves. First century Jews were no different. When somebody makes a lofty claim about themselves (e.g. that they are the answer to prophecy, or they are God's chosen king), we expect proof before we buy into such claims. Even John the Baptist, who declared Jesus to be the lamb of God, later questioned whether he was the one to come or whether they should expect another (Matthew 11:2-3). The gospels report that multiple people asked Jesus for a sign to establish his credentials. Most of us would probably dismiss somebody out of hand without even asking for a sign because, let's face it, we think people are crazy when they say the kinds of things Jesus said about himself. That's why "lunatic" is part of C.S. Lewis' famous trilemma.

The fact that Jesus was the messiah was never, by itself, a guarantee that everybody would recognize it. For an average Jew living in the first century, there was plenty of room for doubt. In fact, I'll add a fourth reason - most Jews in the first century probably never even saw Jesus or heard him speak. At most, they might've heard a rumor about him. It would not surprise me if a large fraction of Jews never even heard about him during his lifetime.

Since there's no reason to expect that most Jews would've believed in Jesus during his lifetime even if he had been the messiah, the fact that they didn't believe in him is no reason for us to doubt that he is the messiah.

A simple response to the normalizability objection to the fine-tuning argument

The normalizability objection isn't necessarily an argument against fine-tuning. Rather, it's an argument against the idea that we can quantify fine-tuning or attach a specific probability to it. There are some people who think you need to be able to attach a number to a probability before probability makes any sense, but I want to challenge that idea.

Let's say you're standing in front of a wooden fence. As far as you can see to the left and to the right, the fence kind of disappears over a hill, through the trees, or maybe even out to the horizon. You don't know how far it goes beyond that point. As far as you can see in either direction, the fence is red. But there is one board right in front of you that's blue. You may have no idea how far the fence goes in either direction, but you can still see that the blue part is relatively tiny in comparison to the part you can see. Since you can't tell how far the fence goes, you can't normalize the probability that throwing a dart from any random location will result in sticking in the blue part rather than the red. But that doesn't prevent you from noticing that there's a lot more red than blue, and your dart is far more likely to hit the red part than the blue.

In the same way, you can tell that the life-permitting range is much smaller than the possible range of values to the fundamental constants and initial conditions of the universe. You can tell that changing the values by a small amount will result in a life-prohibiting universe without having to know the full range of possible values. So you don't need to know precisely how fine-tuned the universe is to know that it's fine-tuned.

I think this is what Robin Collins was getting at in his chapter in the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology.

One counter-argument that could be raised to my analogy is that for all we know, the fence becomes blue over the horizon. Maybe it's blue from there on out, which means there could be far more blue than red. We just wouldn't know. If the blue represents the life-permitting range, then we'd have to say that maybe at some arbitrarily large or small value to some constant, the universe becomes life-permitting again.

Although it's possible, for all I know, that there could be islands of habitibility in the parameter space of all the constants, it strikes me as being unlikely that these islands would be very big if they exist at all. If we just limit ourselves to the known laws of physics and our ability to model, calculate, and simulate universes, as far as we are able to see, there are no remote pockets of habitility. If you just keep increasing or decreasing the value of some constant beyond the life-permitting range, the problem for habitility appears to only get worse. We can tell that without having to take it out to infinity. But admittedly, I don't know the physics well enough to press that point too hard.

For more thoughts on the normalizability objection see "The noramlizability objection to fine tuning, take one."

Stress testing your own apologetic

Do not despise prophecies, but test everything; hold fast what is good. ~1 Thessalonians 5:20-21

Let's say you want to design a super suit that will allow you to survive in outer space, under water, a burning building, and Antarctica in winter. You design it with materials you think can withstand high temperatures and low temperatures and maintain a constant pressure inside whether the pressure outside is higher or lower while keeping the occupant comfortable. You want it to be flexible so the person can move around in it. You want it to be strong so it doesn't rupture. You want it to be air tight while providing breathable air. And you want it to be able to maintain these properties through a wide range of temperatures and pressures.

Let's say you design and build this suit based on your knowledge of materials and the conditions under which you expect the suit will have to hold up. Once you've built it, how do you know it will work? Would you just assume the suit was good to go and allow somebody to take it out into the field? Would you happily put the suit on and walk through a burning building or jump into the ocean without having tested it? I suspect not.

Since you want it to keep people comfortable in space, you'd want to make sure it could do the job before somebody uses it for that purpose. You would want to test it. One way you might test it is by pressurizing it to see if there are any leaks. Since space is a vacuum, you want to make sure it can withstand a pressure differential of at least one atmosphere. What you would definitely not want to do is pressurize it half way and just assume it'll be good the whole way. In fact, you would probably want to raise the presurre inside to well beyond what you think is necessary. That gives you a margin of safety. If it can withstand a presurre differential of 10 atmospheres, then you'll feel much better about it's ability to work with a pressure differential of 1 atmosphere.

In other words, you want to stress test your suit. Before anybody steps into it, you want to see how far you can push the suit before it breaks. You want to come up with worst case scenarios to see how the suit holds up. The more rigorous the testing, the more confident you can be that the suit is safe to use. You test the suit by trying to make it fail. If it fails under testing, then you either abandon the design altogether or you attempt to improve upon the current design. Then you test it again. You keep doing that until the suit proves itself reliable under extreme conditions. Ideally, you want to make sure it's fully operational under conditions that are even worse than you think it will ever have to endure out in the field.

This is a procedure I think should apply, not just to super suits, but to your beliefs and your worldview as well. You don't want to believe something that's false. You want to believe what's true and right.

This procedure should apply to arguments as well. If you are designing a case for some point of view you want to promote in the public square, you don't want to just compile a random collection of arguments and start posting them on the internet. Instead, you should want to test them to see if they are good arguments. This applies whether we're talking about Christianity, politics, or any situation in which you hope to persuade another person of your point of view.

The first step in testing your case is to try to come up with counter-arguments. Look for holes or flaws in your own reasoning. Try to think of what it would take to falsify your point of view. Come up with the best objections you can think of. See if the arguments can withstand your own best attempt at refuting them.

You have to be honest with yourself in this process. If you were designing a super suit, of course you would want it to succeed. But it would be dangerous to go easy on the testing just so you don't have to watch it fail. In the same way, it would be reckless to "test" your case against what you know good and well are flimsy rebuttals. It would be reckless to test your case against an easily refutable strawman version of an objection. So you need to think of the best objections you can. If you know of some popular response to your argument, try to think of the best version of that response. If it's a weak response, then steel man it. Try to improve upon it.

This is how the scholastic philosophers like Anselm and Thoma Aquinas used to write. They would begin with an initial argument, then raise objections against it, then raise objections to those objections. They would continue this process, refining their view as they went along, until they finally arrived at a conclusion.

Modern analytic philosophers do something similar. A good example of that is in Alvin Plantinga's book, God, Freedom, and Evil. He spends several pages going back and forth trying to come up with a way to show an inconsistency between the theistic set containing the statements (1) God is all knowing, all powerful, and wholly good, and (2) Evil exists. He would raise some possible statement that when added to the theistic set would generate a formal contradiction. Then he would shoot that down and either adjust the statement or come up with another one. He continued this procedure until he ran out of ideas. In the end, he said that while the elusive proposition might yet exist, it would not be easy to find.

Once your case appears to hold up well under your own scrutiny, see how well it holds up against your friends' scrutiny. Somebody else who is on your side might be able to come up with objections you didn't think of. I used to be part of a private Christian apologetics group on Facebook many years ago. Most of them were pro-life, and I was, too. I wanted to test the pro-life case by having a devil's advocate debate. I took the pro-choice position and tried to come up with the best pro-choice case I could to see how the other person would respond. I hoped that he would be able to refute my arguments because I thought it would be a learning experience for me. It would enable me to improve my case for the pro-life position. I found a volunteer, and we had a formal mock debate.

I've had devil's advocate debates on debate.org, too. I do them partly as a learning experience, and partly for the fun of it. The good thing about defending a point of view opposed to your own is that it forces you to step in another person's shoes and try to see things from their perspective. It can be an effective way to gain a better understanding of their view than you might if you were just reading what they had to say, all the while raising objections to it in your head. Instead, you'd be reading what they had to say while thinking, "What are they actually trying to say?" and "How can I make this work?" You'd be reading for understanding rather than reading to respond, which often leads to misunderstanding.

In the past, I've called popular Christian apologists, philosophers, and scientists on their radio shows, sent them emails, or commented on their blog posts, raising objections to some talking point or argument I might agree with already to see how they would respond and hopefully learn from them.

Once you test your ideas under friendly fire, a third step would be to test them in the real world. This blog exists primarily for that reason. I express a lot of opinions on this blog in hopes of getting some interaction with people who are interested in the subject matter. I want to hear from people who disagree with me. I want them to push back. I also want to hear from people who agree with me in case they want to push back or tell me they think I'm on the right track. I also want to see how they will respond to my critics and how my critics will respond to them. I want different perspectives because I can't think of everything, and I don't know everything.

This blog used to get a lot more participation. I rarely get comments anymore, and I kind of feel like I'm talking to myself. This has caused me to sometimes be a little more risky about what I post. Yesterday, for example, I posted an argument for God I had just come up with. It's probably a flawed argument or somebody else would've already come up with it. But I didn't see the harm in posting it and offering my own initial thoughts on it. I included an objection I thought of, but I figured other people who knew more than I did might have something to say.

When I actually want to make a case for some point of view in order to persuade other people, I want to make sure I have the best case that I can have. I want to be able to articulate it in a way that's clear, easy to understand, and compelling. I don't want it littered with weak arguments. In sport debating, I might use weak arguments for filler or to waste the other person's time, but if I really want to persuade people, I only use what I personally think are the best arguments. They have to be arguments that I myself find persuasive. If I want to have a case like that, it has to be something I've tested against my own attempts to refute, against my team or tribe's ability to refute, against the objections raised by random people on the internet, and against the smartest people I can engage. If you ever want to write a book or an article, or if you want to pursuade your family or people you meet in the wild, I recommend testing your case first. Refine your apologetic by subjecting it to the fire of criticism.

Most people don't do that. Whether we're talking about Christian apologetics, abortion, climate change, gun control, or a host of public policy issues, most people simply look for anything that will confirm what they already believe. They're not interested in anything that might challenge their point of view. They're often dismissive. When I see people on line arguing with each other, I don't usually get the impression they're really listening to each other. I don't get the impression many people are interested in anything anybody else has to say. They treat each other with derision rather than curiosity. Sometimes, I think people avoid opposition out of fear and anxiety. If they are emotionally invested in their point of view, they don't want to find out that they're wrong. But I encourage you not to be afraid of the big bad critic. If you want to know the truth, it does you no good to simply seek to confirm what you already believe and avoid opposition. That would be like taking an untested super suit to Antarctica in the winter and hoping to survive.

A new argument for God

Here's an argument for God I came up with today (11/30/2025). I don't know if it's a good argument. I just came up with it. But here it is.

1. If there is no God, then you are a Boltzmann brain.
2. You are not a Boltzmann brain.
3. Therefore, there is a God.

Defense of the first premise

According to the standard model in cosmology (Λ-CDM), the expansion of the universe is accelerating. That means the universe will never recollapse. It will expand forever.

In the meantime, entropy will go up until the universe reaches thermodynamic equilibrum. Once it does, the only thing that will ever happens is that over vast oceans of time, there will be random low entropy fluctuations.

Small fluctuations will be more frequent than large fluctuations, but as long as something has some positive probability of happening, it will happen. It is possible for particles in equilibrium to spontaneously organize itself into the form of a human brain, even if just for a moment. In fact, that is vastly more probable than there being enough particles that spontaneously all organize themselves into a single location and become a whole universe populated with sentient beings like us.

With that being the case, the entire history of our universe should have vastly more isolated brains that fluctuate into existence than real people like us. And with that being the case, it's vastly more probable that you are one of these brains than it is that you're a real person.

According to Christian theology, that is not the fate of our universe. At some point, God is going to intervene. He's going to make everything new. He's going to raise physical people to eternal life. The earth will be our home forever. That requires some drastic change to the universe that should prevent the universe from ever reaching thermodynamic equilibrium. That, in turn, will prevent the emergence of Boltzmann brains.

If the Christian God doesn't exist, and no other God exists to prevent nature from taking its course, then we probably are Boltzmann brains.

The only way to avoid this conclusion is to suppose that Λ-CDM is not correct. It may not be. I've blogged on that a few times before. But right now, it's the prevailing view of cosmologists, and the evidence favours Λ-CDM. If new evidence comes in that overturns Λ-CDM, that's all well and good. But for the moment, we ought to incline our belief to where the evidence currently points, and that's Λ-CDM.

So if there is no God, then you probably are a Boltzmann brain.

Defense of the second premise

However, it is not reasonable to think you are a Boltzmann brain. If you were a Boltzmann brain, then you would not have reliable belief-producing cognitive abilities. The reason is because everything you know and experience just randomly fluctuated into being along with your brain. It has no connection to reality. You can't possibly know anything about the real world if all your thoughts and sensations just randomly fluctuated into being.

It's not reasonable to think you are a Boltzmann brain because if you were, it would undermine any reason you had for thinking you were a Boltzmann brain. If you came to that belief because of your "knowledge" of cosmology, but none of that "knowledge" was reliable, then you have no reason to think you are a Boltzmann brain. The belief that you are a Boltzmann brain is self-defeating since it undermines everything you believe.

To be a rational person, you must affirm the second premise in my argument. You must deny that you are a Boltzmann brain.

If you are a not a Boltzmann brain, but you would be if there were no God, then there must be a God.

That's the argument in a nutshell.

A possible objections and response

I can think of at least one objection to this argument. Recall what I said before about leaning in favor of Λ-CDM because it's the prevailing view, and that's where all the evidence currently points. One could just as well use this argument to show that Λ-CDM is false rather than saying God exists. You could make an argument like this:

1. If Λ-CDM is true, then you are a Boltzmann brain.
2. You are not a Boltzmann brain.
3. Therefore, Λ-CDM is not true.

With this argument in place, you wouldn't need to invoke God in order to avoid being a Boltzmann brain. I guess the question would come down to which is most likely to be false - that God exists or that Λ-CDM is true.

There isn't much evidence against the existence of God, which is why it's so popular for people to say they lack a belief in God rather than saying they believe God doesn't exist. Nobody wants to have to prove a negative, so they don't claim God doesn't exist.

Λ-CDM has some evidence against it, but so far it hasn't been overturned. So far, the evidence still seems to favor Λ-CDM.

With little or no evidence against the existence of God, and plenty of evidence for Λ-CDM, it seems more reasonable to affirm Λ-CDM than to deny God. That means the argument for God at the beginning of this post is probably sound and the argument against Λ-CDM is probably not sound.

I don't know, though. Λ-CDM isn't really a complete picture of the cosmos. Maybe there will be some irreversible process in the future, other than increasing entropy or divine intervention, that will prevent Boltzmann brains from ever forming.

If everything spreads out forever, I don't see how it's possible for there to be spontaneous fluctuations of low entropy that produce Boltzmann brains. Everything would be too far apart.

But maybe that's just the point. In animations I've seen on YouTube that explain entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, they'll show a box filled with gas that's evenly spread out and everything is in motion. But then, given enough time, there should be a point at which the molecules somehow all end up in one small corner of the box. It's unlikely, but given enough time, it can happen. That would be a random fluctuation of low entropy.

So maybe, even though everything in the universe is really spread out, it's possible for some particles to spontaneously gather in different places and have localizes regions of low entropy.

What do you think?

Strike Three for the Cosmological Constant?

It looks like the cosmological constant, aka lambda, aka dark energy has taken another hit. First it was the timescape model, which I blogged about before. According to this model, the apparent acceleration of the expansion of the universe is just an illusion brought on by time dilation and growing voids. Then a paper came out claiming, based on some data from the Desi telescope, that although dark energy is real, the cosmological constant may not be constant after all. It changes over time. I blogged about that, too. Now, a new study claims that the expansion of the universe may not be accelerating after all. Sabine Hossenfelder made a video about it.

These are interesting times.

What does it mean to believe something?

When I was a kid, I came to the "realization" that I couldn't actually be certain about anything because for anything I thought was true, it was at least possible that I was wrong. The seeds of this idea began when I was in the 2nd grade trying to remember an incident a year or two earlier in which I fell asleep in the bushes beside a tennis court near my house. I couldn't remember waking up and crawling out of the bushes, which made me wonder if I was still asleep and just having a vivid dream. This thought haunted me for several years.

At some point, I took the thought a little further. If it was possible that I could still be dreaming, then it's just as possible that the whole kit and caboodle was a dream. Maybe I even dreamed that I fell asleep by that tennis court. Maybe nothing I took to be true was real. Maybe I've always been in a dream state. Maybe humans don't even exist. Maybe I'm an alien. Maybe there is no physical world at all, and it's all just perception.

These thoughts eventually lead me to the conclusion that I didn't really know anything. However, I wasn't a total skeptic either. I accepted that I was probably a real person living in a real world. It's just that I could never be absolutely certain. That meant I didn't really know anything. I just had degrees of confidence. I had beliefs, but not knowledge.

I made a conscious effort to stop saying I know stuff and to say, "I believe," instead. I pictured belief to be a spectrum of degrees of confidence, and that I could never be 100% sure of anything. This idea may have lasted into my early 20's, but I'm not sure.

Although I didn't make any effort back then to define belief and knowledge, it appears that I took knowledge to amount to 100% certainty. Anything short of that, and you don't have knowledge. You just have belief.

Later on, I came to the realization that there were at least a few things that I could be certain about, including my own existence, basic math, and the laws of logic. But most things were still beliefs that fell somewhere on the confidence spectrum. I knew I existed, but I didn't know what kind of being I was or whether I had a physical body. I only believed I was a physical human being.

I changed my mind about what it meant to know something in one of my philosophy classes in college. My teacher, whose name I think was David Sosa, walked us carefully through the standard definition of knowledge as justified true belief. It all made perfectly good sense to me, and I've accepted that understanding of knowledge ever since. I became a lot more comfortable saying I know stuff because a person could have a justified true belief even if they lacked 100% confidence.

He didn't just hand us the definition and explain the ingredients. He gave us thought experiments and asked us questions to lead us to the definition. One thought experiment he used was a situation in which somebody guessed the right lottery numbers, actually believed they were the winning numbers, and ended up being right. Then he asked us whether the person knew the right lottery numbers. We intuitively recognized that he didn't. What was the missing ingredient? This thought experiment was meant to illustrate that having a true belief was not sufficient for knowledge, and that justification was also required. I have been using that same thought experiment ever since.

One reason I accepted his definition of knowledge was because the more I thought about it, the more I realized that his definition was implicit in the way people actually used knowledge in our daily lives anyway. It was the definition implicit in the way I used the word in unguarded moments when I wasn't trying to be a persnickety philosophy kid. There were lots of times I claimed to know every day things for which I lacked 100% certainty.

Words get their meaning from the way they are commonly used. In every day life, when people say they know something, they don't mean they have infalliable knowledge. They don't mean they are 100% confident. They just mean they're aware of some fact. For example, when people say they know where something is, or they know what time the show starts, or they know who ate the last cookie, they aren't claiming absolute certainty. They're just claiming to be privy to information about something that's true, i.e., they are claiming to have a justified true belief.

My intentional refusal to use the word, knowledge, to refer to anything I thought when I was a kid was just silly. I remember when somebody would ask me if I knew some mundane thing, like where the nearest gas station is, I would say something like, "I don't know where one is, but I believe one is just a block away." I was just trying to be consistent, but I was really being silly, and people were right to think me a little weird.

Since settling on the standard definition of knowledge as justified true belief, I still run into people who hold what I consider to be muddled ideas about these things. For example, I ran into a Mormon bishop one time. When I asked him if he believed such and such, he said, "I don't believe it; I know it." To him, knowledge and belief were mutually exclusive. But according to the standard definition, you can't know something if you don't at least believe it. To believe something is merely to think it's true. You can't know something is true if you don't even think it is true.

I've run into people who refuse to say they believe anything. They tell me they either know something or they don't. They don't have beliefs. These people strike me as being just as silly as I was when I was a kid, except they were silly in the opposite way. Whereas I claimed to only have beliefs and no knowledge, they claim to only have knowledge and no beliefs.

Although I've asked, I can't remember ever getting a straight answer from one of these people when I asked them to define what they mean by "knowledge" and "belief," so I can only speculate. I think they take belief to amount to something like arbitrary assent. If you think something is true, but you have no justification, then that's a belief. But if you have justification for thinking something is true, then you have knowledge. So to them, there's no such thing as a justified belief. For a lot of these people, belief is a religious term that's roughly equivalent to blind faith. A good question to ask one of these people is, "Suppose you think something is true for what looks to you to be good reasons, but it's actually not true. You're mistaken. Do you have knowledge in that case? If not, is that a belief? What would you call it?"

Blind faith is clearly not what most people mean when they say they believe something. By the ordinary use of the word, to believe something is merely to think it's true. If you think the polar ice caps are going to melt in the next ten years, then that's what you believe. It is possible to believe something for good reasons, flimsy reasons, or no reason at all. Whether you have justification or not for thinking something is true, it's still a belief. It's possible to believe something and be right about it or wrong about it. Whether it's true or not, it's still a belief.

The standard definition of knowledge makes good sense. Imagine a person says, "I know the earth orbits the sun," but then turns around and says, "I don't think it's true that the earth orbits the sun." Would we not think they were contradicting themselves? Or, imagine a person says, "I believe you can get a taco for $2 at yonder food truck," but then followed it up with, "But I know you can't." Would that person not be contradicting themselves? How can you claim to know something if you don't even think it's true? I don't think you can do that consistently.

It doesn't make sense to say you know something if you don't at least think it's true. And if you think it's true, then you believe it. Believing just means you assent to it, you think it's true, it is your point of view, it's what you take to be accurate, etc. Belief and knowledge, then, are not mutually exclusive. They're complimentary. It's possible to believe something and not know it, but it's not possible to know something and not believe it.

I suppose the only exception might be in a case where deep down somebody knows that something is true, but they're just in denial about it. That's the only scenario I can think of where a person might know something in some sense without believing it. But that's debatable because if they know something deep down, then they probably also believe it deep down. Their denial is surface level and not entirely honest, so it's probably not a real belief anyway. The psychological mechanics of what it means to be in denial might warrant a blog post of its own.

The bottom line is that from just observing the way people talk, and introspecting on the way I talk, it looks to me like the common every day use of the word, "believe," just entails that somebody thinks something is true. Belief doesn't mean blind faith. Belief and knowledge are not mutually exclusive. Knowledge does not require certainty, but it does require belief.

Even if knowledge did require certainty, wouldn't it be certain. . .belief?

I addressed the Gettier problem on another blog post.

Does the second law of thermodynamics imply that the universe had a beginning?

Anybody who has read my origin story knows the prominent role the second law of thermodynamics played in moving me from agnosticism to theism. But for those who haven't, here's the TLDR.

I learned about the second law of thermodynamics in the Navy's nuclear power school. After I got out of the navy, I went to the University of Texas at Austin. One day, while out walking, I was thinking about the first and second laws of thermodynamics, and it occured to me that they couldn't both be true. I stewed over that for a few days or weeks (don't remember exactly how long) until I came to the conclusion that the universe must've had a beginning, which means there must be a creator. That was the end of my agnosticism.

Since that time, I was introduced to Aristotle, Aquinas, and Christian apologetics. I discovered additional reasons to think the universe had a beginning. (As a side note, Aristotle didn't argue for a temporal beginning, but I did misunderstand him to be making that argument.)

Also, since that time I gained a greater understanding of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics. In the process, I came to realize the second law does not necessarily imply a beginning after all. It still suggested a beginning, but I stopped relying on it so heavily because it didn't strike me as being a strong enough reason to think there was a beginning.

But since that time, I've come back around to thinking the second law does give us strong reason to think the universe had a beginning. It isn't certain, but it's very close to it.

Why I originally thought the Second Law of Thermodynamics implied the beginning of the universe and therefore God

Here's the reason I originally thought the second law implied a beginning. If the second law is true, then entropy increases in every process. That means no matter what happens in the universe, the net entropy will go up. This is true even if entropy goes down in some localized place. In power school, we were taught that entropy was the amount of energy in a system that's no longer available to do work. As entropy goes up, less and less energy is available to do work, i.e. to bring about change. Unless you get rid of some of that useless energy or add some new energy to the system, eventually the system will wind down and nothing else will happen.

If the first law is true, then energy is neither created nor destroyed. That means whatever exists has always existed and always will exist. But if the whole universe has always existed, then it should've already reached maximum entropy. There shouldn't be any stars or galaxies. There shouldn't be any life. The universe should be in a state of thermodynamic equilibrium. It should just be a big homogeneous, uninteresting, diffuse something or other. Cosmologists call it the heat death of the universe, which I learned later.

Yet here we are with plenty of order, complexity, and activity. The universe is far from thermodynamic equilibrium. That means it can't be the case that the universe has existed for infinite time. The universe must've begun a finite time ago. And since the universe had a beginning, it had to have had a cause. That cause could not itself be physical or it, too, would be subject to the second law, and it would also have to have had a beginning. The more I thought about it, the more it looked like God, so that's what I thought it was.

That was my original reason for becoming convinced that there was a God. From there, Christianity was an easy sell because it's what I knew, I already had an affinity for it, and I never really stopping calling myself a Christian even while I was agnostic.

Why I shied away from appealing to the second law to argue for a beginning of the universe

I later gained a better understanding of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics that weakened my case for a beginning of the universe.

The reason entropy increases with every process is because that's the most likely thing to happen. The second law of thermodynamics is not a fundamental law. It's an emergent law. It's a consequence of statistical probability.

Entropy is colloquially called a measure of disorder, spreading out, equilibrium, etc. These are all decent descriptions because they capture what most of us observe when we observe entropy increasing. If you put a hot cup of coffee in a cold box, heat will flow from the hot to the cold until the temperature of everything is the same. If you put a bunch of folded clothes into a dryer and turn it on, the clothes will become unfolded. If you drop a basketball, it will bounce repeatedly until it eventually comes to rest. If you throw a bunch of chemicals in a jar, they'll react until they settle down and stop reacting. These are all examples of entropy increasing. The second law says entropy increases in every process, so it's always increasing. The second law of thermodynamics is the reason there can never be a perpetual motion machine. If you want to keep the thing running, you have to add new energy to it. Otherwise, it will run down and eventually stop.

That is a decent enough layman understanding of entropy. But there is a more robust, precise, and scientific definition. Entropy is a measure of how many micro states correspond to the same macro state. The equation for entropy looks like this:

\[ \normalsize S = k_B \ln \Omega \]

Where. . .

• \( S \) = entropy
  
• \( k_B \) = Boltzmann’s constant
  
• \( \Omega \) = number of microstates consistent with the same macrostate

By "macro state," I mean a view of the system from afar, zoomed out, so to speak. It's a coarse description of the whole system. By "micro state," I mean the zoomed in view. It's a more fine or granular look at the system. It's a detailed look at the parts.

Here's a couple of examples. Consider a cylinder that contains a gas under pressure. You can consider the pressure in the container as the macro state. The exact position and motion of each molecule of gas in the container is the micro state. There are countless configurations the individual molecules could be in that would result in the pressure of the container being the same. So this is a high entropy system.

Now, consider a computer screen that uses only three colours to generate any image. The image on the screen currently is all blue on the right half and all green on the left half. If each pixel can only be red, green, or blue, then there aren't very many micro states that can produce the same macro state. So this is a low entropy situation.

You should be able to see from these two examples why entropy can be thought of as a measure of disorder, randomness, homogeneity, spread-outness, equilibrium, etc. When things are pretty evenly distributed, there are countless ways the zoomed in details could be different while the zoomed out picture would be the same. But when things are very ordered, there are fewer ways the zoomed in picture could be different while keeping the big picture the same.

You should also be able to see where the second law of thermodynamics comes from. It comes from the fact that in any given system, there are vastly more configurations that are just random noise than configurations that have structure and order. Consider a cookie sheet full of little pieces of alphabet cereal. There are vastly more configurations that sheet of cereal could take that don't form words and sentences than there are configurations that make words and sentences. With that being the case, if you were to start with a sheet of alphabet cereal that has maybe a couple of sentences while the rest of the bits are spread around randomly, and you shook that sheet, it is more probable that the final state would have fewer words and sentences than that it would have more. Whenever there's a change in a system, it's always more probable that the next state of that system will be closer to equilibrium than farther from equilibrium. The probability of a less ordered state is so great that it appears to be a law that entropy always increases when things change.

However, you should notice that given this understanding of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics is not absolute. It's just a generalization. The reason entropy increases in every process is because higher entropy states are vastly more probable than low entropy states. So every time something in the universe changes, the next state of the universe is vastly more likely to be a higher entropy state than a lower entropy state. That, in turn, means that while lower entropy states are highly improbable, they are not impossible.

Suppose, then, that the universe has been around forever. We should expect that it would be, on average, in thermodynamic equilibrium. It always has been. However, given enough time, there should be occasional random fluctuations of low entropy. Smaller fluctuations will be more frequent than large fluctuations because the bigger the fluctuation, the less probable. But given enough time, even the most unlikely low entropy fluctuations are bound to happen. Given infinite time, even a fluctuation of low entropy as large as our universe was in the beginning of the big bang is inevitable. That seems, on the surface, to undermine the argument for an absolute beginning from the second law of thermodynamics. A universe like ours, with an extremely low initial entropy, is practicaly inevitable, even if the universe is infinitely old.

With that in mind, I shied away from appealing to the second law of thermodynamics to try to prove that the universe had a beginning.

Why the second law of thermodynamics turns out to be a good argument for the beginning of the universe after all

Remember that small fluctuations of low entropy happen more frequently than large fluctuations of low entropy. The reason is because small fluctuations (i.e. fluctuations that deviate from equilibrium by a small amount) are more probable than large fluctuations (fluctuations that deviate from equilibrium by a large amount). If our universe began as a random fluctuation of low entropy, then it would have to have been an unimaginably rare and improbable event. If the universe is infinitely big and/or infinitely old, much smaller fluctuations of low entropy would be more common.

Universes that contain only a single small cluster of galaxies would be more numerous than universes like ours. Universes that have only one galaxy would be more numerous still. Universes with one solar system would vastly outnumber universes like ours that have many solar systems in many galaxies.

A random low entropy fluctuation that produced a single brain, just momentariliy, configured in such a way as to generate the sensation of observing a universe like ours is far more probable than an actual universe like ours populated with billions of conscious observers and trillions of stars and galaxies. That means that if we are to explain our existence as being the result of a random low entropy fluctuation, then it is overwhelmingly more probable that we are just brains that fluctuated into existence a moment ago and are about to disintegrate than that we are actually in a 93 billion light year sized or bigger universe. There would be more of these types of brains (called Boltzmann Brains by the experts) than real observers in real universes, so we are more likely to be Boltzmann brains than real people.

As Sean Carroll has explained, the problem with being a Boltzmann brain is that it calls all your beliefs into question. Since all of your alledged knowledge, perceptions, and experiences were spontaneously created in a random fluctuation, they have no connection to what reality is actually like. If you embrace the idea that you're a Boltmann brain, then you lose all justification for anything you believe. That includes whatever reason you allegedly have for thinking you are a Boltzmann brain. As Sean Carroll puts it, Boltzmann brains are cognitively unstable.

To be rational people, we must reject any cosmological model that makes it more probable than not that we are Boltzmann brains. To be honest people, we have to reject these models. After all, none of us honestly believe we are Boltzmann brains. People may toy with the idea, but if they claim to actually believe it, they're probably not being honest with themselves.

The second law of thermodynamics turns out to be a good reason to think the universe has a finite past after all. The only way to escape this conclusion is to embrace a model of the universe that makes it probable that you are a Boltzmann brain, which means you have to embrace a model of the universe that destroys all justification for believing anything, including that model. Denying that the universe has a finite past on the basis that the second law of thermodynamics isn't absolute and that given enough time, there can be random fluctuations of low entropy that results in structured universes and conscious observers turns out to be a self-defeating objection. With that objection out of the way, the second law of thermodynamics makes it very likely that the universe had a beginning.

The argument for a beginning falls short of certainty because it's still at least possible that we are Boltzmann brains, even if we don't know it. But let's just be reasonable.